On the trail of penis thieves

After reading about the strange phenomenon of magical penis theft, writer Frank Bures couldn’t shake the idea. He obsessed about it for four years, and then, in 2005, hopped a plane to Nigeria to track down victims of the uniquely cultural epidemic, doggedly pursuing a 10-year-long odyssey through the markets, museums and mental hospitals of Thailand, Borneo, Singapore, Hong Kong and China.

That long, strange trip — along with a glimpse into the inner workings of Bures’ exhaustively curious brain, from which an award-winning magazine writing career has flourished — is detailed in Bures’ first book, The Geography of Madness. Subtitled Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes, the book was released last month by Melville House. Bures, who lived in the Madison area from 2003 to 2008 before resettling in Minneapolis, will be back in town to read from his book on May 22 at 2 p.m. at A Room of One’s Own.

In The Geography of Madness, Bures explores the idea of culture — What is it? How do we learn it? How is it shaped and how does it shape us? — from the vantage point of his world travels, which are spontaneous, extensive and kind of weird. The book expands on a 2008 Harper’s essay he wrote on “magical penis theft,” an epidemic that swept Nigeria in the late 1970s in which men (and some women) reported their genitalia had spontaneously disappeared, anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2009.

“All my essays, I guess, are built around some question I want to answer, something I’ve noticed that I want to understand better,” says Bures, when I ask him what kind of writer he is. “I guess I’m just trying to make sense of things.”

And also, he adds, he wants to be honest. “Like, really honest.”

That curiosity and honesty sets Bures’ work apart, says Brennan Nardi, who was associate editor at Madison Magazine in 2003 when Bures first walked his resume over to their old offices on South Paterson Street, not far from the Sherman Terrace apartment where Bures and his wife, Bridgit, were living. The couple had chosen Madison for its just-close-enough proximity to their families in Minnesota, and the Iowa-born Bures had also lived in Madison (shout-out, Orchard Ridge kindergarten!) when his dad was in residency at UW Hospital from 1975 to 1978.

While in Madison, Bures wrote regularly for MadisonMagazine and Isthmus (when he wasn’t tackling data entry at Avol’s Bookstore), churning out stories that might have otherwise gone untold. “How Gay Is Madison?” explored the purported correlation between a city’s LGBT population and a vibrant, “creative class” economy. There was a story about “the orange guy playing piccolo down on State Street, pissing everybody off” and a profile on a local man’s experience with transcendental meditation. He also wrote mainstream features, including profiles on then-new UW Badgers football coach Bret Bielema, and Police Chief Noble Wray during the unsolved Brittany Zimmerman murder case (“That one gave me nightmares.”). Bures wrote about Russ Feingold before he was voted out, and Suzy Favor Hamilton “before she was interesting.” (“I knew there was stuff she wasn’t telling me,” he says.)

In Madison, Bures developed the sort of travel writing that defines his new book, where it’s not necessarily where you go, but how you see where you are. For example, Nardi says her favorite Bures piece was a travel story in which he walked from his home in Verona to downtown Madison.

“I tried really hard to stay out of his way,” says Nardi, “and let his natural curiosity, subversive ideas and creative narrative do the heavy lifting.”

That’s still working for Bures, who now writes from an office above a cafe in Minneapolis within short biking distance of the house he shares with Bridgit and their two daughters. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Outside, Esquire, Bicycling, Men’s Health, Scientific American Mind and The Washington Post Magazine, as well as a number of Best American Travel Writing anthologies.

TheGeography of Madness is not limited to ruminations on penis theft in Nigeria, nor is it a narrowed, ethnocentric study; other symptoms and so-called epidemics, if they’re unique to a culture, are subject to Bures’ scrutiny — including premenstrual syndrome in the United States. Arguably the best glimpse into Bures’ relentless pursuit of knowledge comes at the end of the book, in the beefy 42-page bibliography — a fascinating read in and of itself.

The buttoned-up, bespectacled Midwestern-polite Bures (who also speaks fluent Swahili and Italian, a passing Spanish and “a deteriorated version of Thai”) has a quiet, almost reverent way of slipping in and out of both country and story, telling what he sees in a way that lets you draw your own conclusions. As readers, we get to ask every question we didn’t even know we had.

“Being a writer gives you permission to talk to people that you wouldn’t have if you were just a normal, nosy person wanting to ask people things,” says Bures. “At some point, you’re not fit for anything else.”